One of the greatest challenges I faced during my gap year was establishing a sense of identity. I had gone into the experience feeling as if I didn’t have the right to speak out against things or to speak up about what I value, being a stranger in new spaces, and over the course of the first half of my gap year, I began to feel more and more frustrated with not knowing what I was entitled to say and how I was entitled to behave – in other words, who I was entitled to be. But eventually, I started to see how fundamentally similar life is across so many of these barriers. And at that point, I began to realize how fundamentally similar I was to all the people around me – something that’s often overlooked, undervalued, in globally-minded spaces, as we try to cultivate open minds and sensitivity – and was able to gain a sense, not quite the same person I knew before, but one who was more informed and certainly more comfortable engaging those spaces and the people inhabiting them.